2016 August 11^th

Trump is now speculating about what he would do if he loses the election. He says that he would take a nice long vacation. I doubt that he would because I believe he will get together with Roger Aisles, who is also out of work, and together they will found the Trump TV network.

To suggest in the middle of the August, before the November election, that you might lose and what your plans would be then, does not inspire confidence in your fans…and highly P##### off the folks at the RNC. No matter, Trump has been throwing up straws like these before: Recall his comments about the election being “rigged” getting himself and his fans ready for the inevitable. Finally recognizing that he will lose is the first sign of some healthy reality testing.

Then back to fantasyland we go: Trump claims that President Obama founded ISIS…and that Hillary Clinton was the cofounder. He has repeated this assertion whose logic goes like this: President Obama withdrew our troops from Iraq and Hillary Clinton helped out the Libyan strong man Muammar Khadafy, thus opening the door for the rise of ISIS. That makes them the founders and co-founders of ISIS. This same logic, or its absence, would make Abraham Lincoln the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump brags about his education at The Wharton School, but he somehow missed out on the elementary logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, because “B” follows “A” doesn’t mean “A” causes “B.”

At this point, although Trump had originally meant that by withdrawing troops from Iraq and removing Khadafy, President Obama and Secretary Clinton had created the environment congenial for the rise of ISIS, Now Trump has convinced himself that they are responsible for the rise of ISIS in a much more fundamental sense. The mechanism is not unheard of, if you say something that you don’t believe and say it often and firmly enough, you’ll come to believe what you say; otherwise you have to admit that you are lying. I believe this is what has happened to Trump and it’s happened before. He insisted that Megyn Kelly attacked him at a debate when she simply asked him about comments he had made about women; that a gold star father attacked him by asking what he had ever sacrificed.

Trump’s paranoid streak means that he will believe he is being attacked even when no attack is intended. The result is that he will flail away at anyone, particularly at the press whose job it is to report what he says. He has even “withdrawn the press credentials” of the Washington Post because he doesn’t like what they print about him. Alienating the press is a particularly stupid move for any political candidate. Trump’s paranoia will lead to an unendingly hostile Donald Trump who perceives attackers everywhere. Hostile candidates usually lose elections. Trump is well on his way.

Now that Trump is well behind nationally and has been told that the RNC will have to begin deflecting resources to down ballot candidates, what does Trump say? He says that Hillary Clinton is now worried about losing the election.

2016 August 10^th

In “The Wall Street Journal” for Thursday August 4^th there appeared an opinion piece by Phil Gramm and Mike Solon, partners in a boutique lobbying firm. The firm pushes low tax legislation and in their opinion piece of last Thursday they offered their rationale about why the current recovery is “so slow.”

It will surprise no one to read that these lobbyists (not so identified by the WSJ) are of the opinion that high tax rates under President Obama are responsible. They point out that this recovery is slower than most and they compared the economy’s bounce under President Obama with the bounce that followed previous recessions. (Excepting the recovery after the great depression, which was hampered by Roosevelt’s various make work policies instituted to avoid starving the public.)

So let’s examine this so called slow recovery. There are certainly soft spots and the wages of the middle class have not improved very much. Many of the well-paying job losses are the result of automation, not the result of moving plants abroad. (Trump cannot understand this and neither can his followers.) As I wrote yesterday, we are producing twice as many cars and trucks as were produced when President Obama took office. Unemployment is under 5 percent and the stock market is at an all-time high. None of these data are at all convincing to the Gramm Solo lobbyists. Lobbyists have to convince you that things are terrible and if you hire them they’ll pressure the right legislators to remedy the situation for you.

Let’s look at the terrible tax situation that exists now under President Obama: Consider the corporate tax structure: Gramm Solon claims the federal corporate tax rate is the highest in the world at 35 percent. There are a couple of countries with higher corporate tax rates, but, generally speaking, ours are very high…except very few corporations pay that rate. If you average over the last five years and look at the rates for the top industrialized countries the average “effective corporate tax rate” is 16.1 percent. The US effective tax rate over that period is 13.4 percent. Lobbyists like Gramm and Solon have inserted enough loopholes in the corporate tax structure so that hardly any corporations pay the top rate…and some pay nothing at all. (You won’t learn that by reading WSJ.)

Now about the federal income tax that naughty President Obama has set at a marginal rate of 39.6 percent, but only on incomes topping 400 thousand a year. Gramm Solon considers this “over taxation” a cause of our anemic economic recovery. On the other hand, In 1969 Nixon set the marginal rate at 77 percent; it was at 50 percent in 1986 under Reagan; it was 91 percent under Eisenhower. Isn’t it amazing that the country did not sink irretrievably into depression given those marginal tax rates? Maybe the WSJ could ask these lobbyists why it’s only Democratic presidents whose much lower marginal income tax rates are so dangerous for the economy.

2016 August 9^th

Let’s look back a year. Here is the blog for August 9^th of 2015.

Aug 9^th

No fresh villains emerge today so I’ll comment on some who have been around a while. First we have that gentleman and scholar, Donald Trump, whose thin skin manifested itself on the Fox debate stage Thursday night. The first question was certainly designed to put Trump in a corner. The group was asked to raise a hand if they could not support whoever was chosen as the nominee. This was asking Trump to declare that he would not run as an independent if he didn’t like the way the candidate ball bounced. He didn’t knuckle under and he raised his hand; surprise surprise…and he was not happy to be the obvious butt of the first question.

Then they hit him again; Megyn Kelly asked him why he was so nasty to women interviewers. Well, provoke a rattlesnake and it’ll strike at you. Trump accused this poor woman of being out to get him, of having blood in her eye and “wherever.” This was an obvious accusation that Kelly’s upset was attributable to her menstrual period. Asked later if his comments were out of line his handlers indignantly (and hilariously) claimed that the “wherever” meant her nose, blood coming out of her nose. That only a deviant could think he (Trump) meant anything else. But if he meant nose why didn’t he say nose at the time, instead of saying wherever?

Poor Donald, (?) who because of his wealth, has never had to worry about how his comments affect anybody, is now playing in a very different ball park. His remarks got him disinvited to a Red State rally in Alabama where he would have been the keynote speaker. Oh Pshaw! His ratings out today are affected not at all.

As an aside: The lovely blonde interlocutor, Megyn Kelly, who asked the question that got Donald into trouble, is no stranger to “misspeaking.” A year or so ago, as Christmas closed in, there was some comment about kids who weren’t white identifying with a white Santa Claus. Ms. Kelly, quickly seizing the anti-politically correct torch and waving it high, claimed, “Santa Claus is white. Deal with it!” This comforting word to Santa Claus fans was followed by, “Jesus Christ was white too.”

Not entirely true. Saint Nicholas was Turkish and Jesus was a Levantine Middle-Eastern Jew so we are not describing a pair of pail skinned blue–eyed blondes here. Kelly was asked to explain her remarks because many people were upset by them. Guess what: they were a joke, that’s right—Megyn said it was all a joke. In fact, if you listen to her explanation she is very upset that her listeners didn’t understand the obvious humor in claiming that Santa Claus and Jesus Christ were white. Megyn should stay with Fox because she will never make it as a comic… on second thought?  This is not to excuse Donald Trump’s boorish comment about Megyn Kelly, but it is possible that in some twisted sense they deserve each other.

Now back to the present; we find Roger Aisles and the Fox soft porn show in considerable difficulty. Roger is being sued by many former lady “friends” and is out of a job with a mere 40 mil severance package. Oh my, what’s the poor old man to do now? 

2016 August 8^th

Donald Trump is addressing the Detroit Economic Club as I write this. I listened to him for a bit and it was instructive; he was not greeted by enthusiastic applause on some of the occasions when he obviously expected it. You could tell he thought the line would get applause because he paused just a tick after he said it, then when he got no response, he moved right along.

This speech will provide a truly fun time for FactCheck.org. In the very few minutes I listened to Trump several bits of misleading nonsense emerged. In his rant about the poor employment picture in this country he said that 20 percent of families have no one in the labor market. Horrors! But then my wife and I are retired and not in the labor market; our neighbor, a widow, is not in the labor market, the folks next to her are retired too and not in the labor market, a friend has had a recurrence of cancer and is not in the labor market, her brother has had a stroke and is not in the labor market. The Detroit Economic Club (DEC) is a sophisticated audience; why would anyone expect them to be influenced by such nonsense.

Moving right along Trump tells us about the terrible trade deals that have decimated the auto industry. He mentions the “yuge” number of jobs lost. Drive your car anywhere and you will be impressed by the “yuge” number of cars out there. They aren’t all imports…and many foreign marks are made right here in the US. The jobs are lost, but they are lost primarily to automation. In 2009, the first year President Obama was in office the US manufactured just 5.7 million cars and trucks. That was the low point thanks to the Bush-Cheney recession. In 2014 that production had risen to 11.6 million cars and trucks. This doubling in automobile production was the result of the “failed Obama administration.”

Trump wants to reduce the federal corporate tax rate, now at 35 percent, which Trump claims is the highest in the world. Almost no company pays that rate; GE on a recent year used various loopholes to pay nothing at all. Lobbyists suggest enlarging the loopholes and our fine representatives oblige them. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO) the effective tax rate in 2010 for large major corporations was just under 17 percent. That’s less than half the tax rate Trump is using to scare voters You didn’t really expect honesty from this man did you?

He also wants to reduce “regulations.” Regulations, such as those the government requires for the safety of coal miners, save lives. When they are reduced or ignored they cost lives. Massey Energy’s CEO, Don Blankenship figured his Upper Big Branch mine would be more profitable if he relaxed those pesky regulations just a bit. The result was 29 dead miners and a jail term for Blankenship. What regulations do Trump want to reduce or eliminate? He isn’t saying. Neither is he saying what programs will be cut to compensate for all those tax cuts; nor is he saying how much the cuts will add to the national debt. Some things you just don’t need to know about.

2016 August 7^th

I had begun to believe that Donald J. Trump might be an agent of the Democratic National Committee come to hijack the Republican nomination and then act in a way guaranteed to lose the general election to Hillary Clinton. A good case could be made for that, even now. Trump blew the wheels off his competitors in the primaries. He lost only to Senator Cruz in Wisconsin. He had a powerful appeal to the “poorly educated” as he called them and they adored him. He was on their side. He would bring back those jobs he claimed were lost to bad trade agreements. (They weren’t of course, but the “poorly educated” never stopped to analyze the truth of what Trump told them.)

With a weak field, remember “Bobby” Jindal, Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina? Trump was far better at demonizing and appealing to the xenophobia of the “poorly educated” than any of the other candidates, so he cleaned up; even so, the other candidates in aggregate won more votes that Trump did. In the process Trump has become even more addicted to the cheap applause he can get by appealing to his adoring crowd’s unhappiness with their situation, an unhappiness he encourages at every opportunity.

He wins the nomination in a walk; but by doing so he has alienated (accurate word that) great hunks of the population and a good many principled members of his own party. The notion that he can now begin to heal the rifts and act more presidential appeals to many who view him with suspicion and to date they have seen little change from the self-centered nine year old who won the primaries.

So is Trump an agent of the DNC come to guarantee Hillary Clinton the White House? No, I don’t believe the DNC is that clever.

Trump’s Russian connection is very interesting: Everyone knows about his insistence that Russian would not invade the Ukraine even after they had already done so. We can add to that Trump’s apparent fondness for Putin and Putin’s complimenting of Trump. Trump’s comments about how nice it would be if we could just be friends with Russia. And then there is Michael Morell, Deputy Director of the CIA . Mr. Morell had this to say about Trump and Putin:

 "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them.” That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. "Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated."

Paul Manafort, the head honcho of Trump’s campaign, is an old Russian hand. He had been hired by Vicktor Yanukovych, the Russian leaning Premier of Ukraine, to rehabilitate Yanukovych’s image after the Ukraine parliament kicked him out and he found asylum back in Russia.

Trump’s Russian connection was topped off when the Trump faction at the RNC, meeting to determine the platform content, insisted that any reference to arming Ukraine be removed. This produced quite a stir and particularly when Manafort and the Trump faction denied that they had done any such thing. Unfortunately for them there were a great many witnesses to testify that they had done exactly that.

Who knows, maybe instead of being a mole for the Democrats, Trump is a mole for the Russians.

2016 August 6^th

Donald Trump, speaking in Wisconsin last night, endorsed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Arizona Senator John McCain and New Hampshire Senator Kelli Ayotte, all for the coming elections. Trump spoke while reading directly from a script just like his handlers wanted him to do. There was all the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a ransom note dictated by his captors and, indeed, that is what this endorsement amounted to. Trump reading from a script  does not have the appeal of Trump’s unrehearsed unpredictability.

Congressman Ryan’s primary opponent, Paul Nehlen, has already received the nod from Trump who thanked him “for his kind words,” so this now makes Trump’s “endorsement” of Ryan largely moot. It was anyway because Ryan is very popular in his district and is a shoe in to return to Congress and to his speakership. Trump’s endorsement of Ryan helped Trump in Wisconsin far more than it helped Ryan…and Trump needs all the help in Wisconsin he can get.

Given the Latino population in Arizona Senator McCain might well prefer not to have Trump’s endorsement; it will not help him with a large and growing segment of the Arizona population.

Senator Ayotte is already ten points behind her popular opponent, the Democratic Governor, Maggie Hassan. Trump is behind Clinton in New Hampshire by 15 points; some help his endorsement of anyone will be in that state.

Even if Trump veers off track by not attacking Clinton, Fox and Friends with Tucker Carlson and two other non-entities (One of those a short-skirted blonde woman selected for her reporting skills of course.) were busy today attacking Hillary Clinton on her emails. A search of three thousand emails revealed that three had been marked somewhere in the document with a “C” for confidential and Clinton didn’t treat those emails with appropriate care. Comey, the FBI chief, admitted that Clinton might not have even seen that “C.” No matter, the folks at Fox have very little to hang their criticisms on, so they’ll hang on for dear life to what little they have.

The Benghazi killings continue to provide right wing ammunition. Never mind that Clinton was quizzed for eleven hours by a Congressional tribunal again and they found no smoking gun. Their waste of government money on this witch hunt has now become embarrassing. It’s interesting that the Republican house can find money to continue the investigation of Hillary Clinton but they can’t find money to fight the mosquito borne Zica virus. Is it any wonder Congress’ approval rating is about 13 percent? 

2016 August 5^th

First some curious housekeeping business: If you have been following this blog you are surely aware that it is not all that popular; on a good day it will get a dozen hits but more often it is about half of that. I do not expect a Pulitzer Prize.

 About ten days ago a curious thing happened, I had thirty some hits according to the free analytics that comes with this site. There is more, the next day there were sixty some hits and then the day after that there were over 130 hits. That is a geometric increase and I wasn’t raffling off Jaguars.

The analytics supplied could provide a geographic analysis of the blog’s hits. Was I suddenly discovered by the DNC; was some syndicate after me to do a regular column; no and no. These increased  hits were all coming from…Russia, with a few from China. And then things returned to normal. What happened? I have no idea.

Trump’s poll numbers show him in trouble in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Virginia, Florida and in most any other toss-up state you can name; At least these were once toss-up states. Where was Trump putting his efforts yesterday? It was in Maine of course, wouldn’t that be expected…hey, he could have decided to spend a few days in Rhode Island...or maybe Delaware. Maybe Maine gives him some relief from global warming to which he plans to add by putting all the coal miners back to work. Can we say pander?

Tonight he is off to Wisconsin to treat his fans to heavens knows what bits of his imagination, but Speaker Ryan won’t be there, neither will Governor Walker, neither will Congressman Mike Gallagher, neither will Senator Ron Johnson. I doubt that Trump will want Palin to return to introduce him because she did that last April when he lost Wisconsin to Senator Cruz.

Trump is haranguing a crowd in Iowa. He is supposed to be a great “counterpuncher” so it is no surprise that he has taken some of the recent questions about his own sanity and his temperamental fitness to control our nuclear weapons an turned those concerns right back at Hillary Clinton. In the sixth grade this would be the “So’s your old man” response. It isn’t very original but it is probably the best the Trump team can produce. On the stage in Iowa he referred to Hillary Clinton as “unhinged;” sound familiar? Trump is quite simply accusing Clinton of the problem many people are convinced he has himself. He has done the same thing with the nuclear codes suggesting that Clinton is unfit to be trusted with them. Now his response is to send it back about Clinton. Given all the available ammunition against Clinton why use that? It must be, “I’ll hit you right where you hit me” even if there are better openings.

The sixth grader is never very far away.